Editorial to the Supplement 1, 2007.

For several years now the concept of virtual museum has had an important role among the approaches being used for the diffusion of cultural information, as it offers an important extension to the traditional museum. In this paper, the author briefly discusses the concepts of the applications of virtual museums, by studying the transformation of a real museum into a virtual museum. The two new concepts of “the museum of museums” and that of “the imaginary museum” are also introduced. We define the portal functions and the virtual functions of a real museum, and then the functions of the “museum of museums” and of the “imaginary museum”. We also briefly summarize the technical Internet context implied in the realization of a virtual museum and its main operating principles.

Current official definitions of “museum” in different countries are examined, together with their implications: the role of museums, their characteristics, the activities museums are expected to conduct. The presence of virtual museums on the Internet is also evaluated. As far as archaeology is concerned, the term “musealization” is analyzed, which denotes the operations necessary to transform a monument or a site into a tourist destination; therefore it brings in itself two opposite meanings of preservation, by means of organized actions and favoring the access and the economic exploitation of the heritage resources. The aspects of technology and virtuality available to museum and archaeological site curators are given in detail, describing dedicated international projects. The author concludes by analyzing the issue of the user’s perspective in the virtual museum as well as the requirements of specialized scholars.

The author makes some general observations on the scope of various approaches to archaeological virtualisation, with particular reference to virtual exhibitions. He examines some interesting fully dynamic, evolving case-studies and, linking the historical development of archaeology to that of different kinds of archaeological knowledge, he highlights the possibilities offered by hypermedia applications on the World Wide Web not only for public communication, but also for archaeological meaning construction and mode of representation. The overall discussion points include virtual exhibition in the context of virtual museums, the notion of virtualisation and some ideas on content, formal representations and affordances. At the same time, the author laments the fact that virtual exhibitions are still fledgling, unstable practices, ignored by the majority of the archaeological public and, at the same time, by most mainstream archaeologists and most archaeological museums. Further work requires unification with relevant research and practice in Information and Communication Technologies, but also further reflection and research on the production of archaeological meaning through virtualisation.

The “virtual experience”, with all its implications of knowledge enhancement and sharing, has involved numerous CNR researchers, through an interdisciplinary approach, which has characterised and given consistency to the applications, also from a theoretical and methodological point of view. In this special issue, in addition to the projects which are specifically dedicated to archaeology (virtual museums and 3D visualisation of ancient landscapes, towns, grave goods and objects), the contributions describe sophisticated computer tools designed and implemented in CNR laboratories and show how ICT can support the realisation of virtual museums, solving problems related to usability, accessibility and enjoyment aspects.

The author illustrates the positive and negative features of the virtual museum, and the role of visual and new interactive technologies in the cognitive processes. He then defines the concept of the virtual museum as the communicative projection of the real museum. According to this definition, the virtual museum is not a simple copy of the real museum; in fact, the radical re-organization related to the task of communication, also from the point of view of the display structure of the virtual museum, creates the possibility of exploiting powerful and effective visual means, which is the strong point of virtual construction.

In this paper the authors present the approach in the study and reconstruction of archaeological landscapes that has characterized their work carried out at CINECA Supercomputing Center of Bologna, in the Visualization lab (VISIT lab), and in the Institute of Technologies Applied to Cultural Heritage of CNR (CNR-ITABC). The digital pipeline defined in these years of work has lead to the reconstruction of actual landscape (and archaeological landscape is part of our contemporaneity), past landscape, and ecosystems. The presented methodological model is a relational model that uses both bottom-up (data processing from fieldwork with integrated technologies) and top-down (landscape reconstruction through conceptual models, comparative analysis and mental maps) approaches. Landscape virtual museums can be built as ecosystems made of models and dynamic behaviors, where data can be read in a transparent way because of their association with a visible ontology. The proposed digital protocol is defined by procedures, tools (hardware and software), exchangeable data/formats and technologies such as GIS, OpenGL graphic libraries, terrain generators, Open Source software. It integrates 2D spaces and 3D, raster and vector, grid and polygonal models, text and multimedia, with the goal of offering a real time access to cultural and environmental information through off-line and on-line Virtual Reality applications and, in the future, virtual communities that could share experiences in and of the same spatial 3D landscape-mindscape.

The author describes the origin of “Iraq Project: the Virtual Museum of Baghdad”, and discusses two projects which have been approved by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MAE). As part of the humanitarian mission of stabilization and reconstruction in Iraq, they intended to contribute to the funding of activities and initiatives aimed at the reconstruction and safeguarding as well as the enhancement of the Iraqi cultural heritage. A few days after the entry of the US army into Baghdad, the looting and partial destruction of the exhibits were gradually removed to the storerooms that were sealed in 2004. Only the exhibits which were impossible to move remained in their original places. Beginning with the assumption that very few people in the world have been fortunate enough to visit the Iraq Museum and that the Museum will probably be closed for a long time, we felt that it was necessary to reconstruct it virtually so that the visitor could enter, wander through and observe the most important exhibits kept there. At the same time, the Virtual Museum makes it possible to explore and get to know the ancient civilizations and the geographical context in which these arose. The Virtual Museum should facilitate the utilization and understanding of the cultural, historic and scientific artifacts of the Museum without limits of space and time. An analytical presentation is provided that is extremely rich in content, flexible and lends itself to personalization by the user. It offers in addition the advantage of a presentation made possible by instruments for the simplification and narration required for a public of non-specialists.

This paper deals with the results of an experiment that was conducted as part of the CNR Project entitled Iraq Virtual Museum, the goal of which is the construction of a Virtual Museum that will allow the public to enjoy the main archaeological treasures of the ancient civilizations that flourished in the territory of modern-day Iraq. The work was aimed at the contextualization of the ancient objects in the territory of origin. This result was achieved by recourse to image-based technologies and remote sensing. In the exemplary case of the city of Ur, the process of contextualization began with the modelling of the golden helmet of king Meskalamdug, and continued with the reconstruction of the tomb in which it had originally been placed, together with the rest of the funerary objects. This tomb was then contextualized within the Royal Cemetery and the urban layout of Ur. High resolution satellite images made it possible to observe and document the archaeological area as it is today, for a virtual visit and in preparation for a potential real visit in the future. Furthermore, research activities have made it possible to acquire new knowledge of the objects, the monuments, the urban layout and the historical landscape.

The authors present a detailed description of the project of the virtual reunification and recontextualisation of the grave goods found in a tomb of the Sabine necropolis of Colle del Forno, which held a princely burial: archaeological research, technical analyses, restoration, 3D reconstruction of the cart found inside the tomb and of its bronze decoration, and virtual reconstitution of the grave goods – constituted both by local products and objects imported from the Orient, as well as by two wheeled vehicles: a cart and a chariot) – in the framework of their original archaeological and cultural context. Besides a DVD, which shows a video at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in the room containing the exhibition of the cart and other objects from the tomb, a web site has been created (http://www.principisabini.it/): the web visitors can reconstruct the history of the discovery, walk through this 7th-6th century BC tomb, see the structural and functional mechanisms of the cart in action, and enjoy this Italic masterpiece.

Detailed and accurate digital 3D models can be produced with 3D scanning devices, which allow to convert reality in digital form in a cost and time effective manner. The capabilities of this technology and the global methodology are presented here in a synthetic manner. Moreover, we focus on the main issues which are preventing its wider use in contemporary applications, such as: the considerable user intervention required, the usually incomplete sampling of the artifact surface and the complexity of the models produced. Another emerging issue is how to support the visual presentation of the models (local or remote) with guaranteed interactive rendering rates. Some practical examples from the results of current projects in the cultural heritage field will be shown.

This paper outlines some results which have come out from the analysis of the Cultural Heritage domain, an analysis supported by the Virtual Museum of Naples project ReMuNa and SIABeC; both of these initiatives have the objective of promoting the artistic cultural inheritance of Naples. In this context, a domain ontology was developed which allows a more articulated use of the cultural heritage data available and, as it faces the crucial theme of re-contextualization, it also allows to define formal historical reconstructions. In this paper, the “upper “ontology TopLevelReMuNa, i.e. the topmost classes and properties hierarchies embodied in ReMuNaICCD v2.0, is described. According to the authors, the most remarkable features of TopLevelReMuNa are illustrated by the three ontology patterns that are reported here.

The advances of digital technology to the museum world have led to the development of computational tools for the classification of information as well as consultation of semantically correlated documents. The work presented here consists in an experiment, organizing the textual descriptions relative to iconographic works by means of SOM (Self-Organizing Maps), which represent the most common algorithm of artificial neural networks in the category of non-supervised learning, i.e. without the control and contribution of knowledge on the part of the human operator. The system produces a bi-dimensional map in which the words, represented graphically by means of semantically correlated nodes, are contiguous and form agglomerates. Therefore, the visit to a virtual museum containing works located in different sites can take place following pathways which are “conceptually-oriented”, independent of the learner’s cultural background.

A virtual museum is a real challenge, especially when the goal is to contextualize its content and overcome physical, cognitive and cultural hurdles. A good user interface should provide everyone with an equivalent experience, irrespective of their disabilities. On the other hand, disability is a stage in everyone’s life. Web accessibility has several components, and is not merely a technical issue. A good quality web site should be designed for usable accessibility, considering both usability and accessibility issues, giving to the disabled user the sense of inclusion and equal opportunity to participate. Web accessibility has been a concern to several governments, and in many countries accessibility is required by law. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has provided web accessibility guidelines since the birth of the web, addressing all the web accessibility components. Presently a new release of WCAG is going to be issued, characterized by several important novelties (baseline, conformance level, etc.), which will be a big step forward from the previous WCAG. W3C Recommendations also include some accessibility features for 2D graphics and multimedia. The Rich Internet Applications are emerging, and W3C defined a roadmap towards a declarative markup. To overcome the difficulties related to different cultures, Semantic Web technologies and ontologies can give the appropriate support for exchanging and sharing knowledge.

The paper describes a multimodal application, based on haptic/acoustic/visual interaction. A system of this kind offers two very interesting possibilities: it can be used to permit access and comprehension of cultural heritage by visually impaired people, for whom touch and hearing represent the main channels for interaction with the real world and it can also enhance the experience of cultural heritage by sighted people, making it possible to use the sense of touch, which is often forbidden in museum situations. The system not only allows the experience of touching objects which, on account of their location, dimensions, and vulnerability cannot be offered for direct haptic contact, but, in addition, it makes it possible to experience a much more flexible and powerful interaction in complex situations. In fact, virtual models can change in a very dynamic and flexible way to match the needs of the specific user and to help his/her exploration and cognitive process. The system moves the haptic experience into the virtual world where the digital potentials can be used to make communication of the cultural content of each object more effective. Multimodal interaction allows visually impaired people to access cultural heritage involving large spatial information content. The system makes it possible to interact with haptic/acoustic active objects and to select the information that must be shown on the basis of user requirements. Several tests, involving people with different types and levels of visual disabilities, were conducted. They showed that haptic/acoustic interaction and modular representation of information really do help blind people to cope with the serious and challenging task of acquiring and managing spatial data.